Tag: accreditation

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Lambda School shakes off its brand with new name

Lambda School, a buzzy coding bootcamp that has landed over $122 million in known venture capital to date, is rebranding to Bloom Institute of Technology, according to a blog post from CEO Austen Allred.

The company is also updating its tuition payment options to introduce an outcomes-based loan. The financing instrument allows students to take a loan with zero dollars upfront, and then get 110% of their tuition refunded, including fees and interest from an approved lender, if they are unable to secure a job within the next year. A student is only eligible for the refund if they apply to 10 jobs, network with 10 professionals and post at least 5 GitHub contributions to their public GitHub profile per week, for 46 of the 52 weeks within a year.

In order to apply for an outcomes-based loan, a student must be a U.S. citizen, permanent resident or DACA recipient with an established credit history and no outstanding education loan defaults. Additionally, temporary residents can apply for a loan with a co-signer who fits that criteria. At this stage, the outcomes-based loan is not available if a student lives in California. The move means that Bloom will be going beyond the original vision of scaling income-sharing agreements, the controversial financing vehicle that it pioneered. ISAs will continue to be offered as an option, with some changes.

Change at Lambda has felt inevitable for a long while. Nearly a year after its last layoff, Lambda School announced more cuts in April amid a broader restructuring. Then, Allred admitted that it’s been difficult to make his company’s vision work.

“We have been working for years on making incentive-aligned education work,” Allred tweeted in August. “It’s harder than we initially thought; we’ve had to invent a lot from scratch simultaneously and we have to get a lot of things exactly right.”

Lambda’s rebrand comes after years of scrutiny from former students and educators about the efficacy of its education. Most recently, independent journalist Vincent Woo published a piece alleging that Lambda is inflating its job-placement rates and then marketing those to eager students. The company is also facing a lawsuit from three former students alleging misleading financial and educational practices.

The name change could thus shake off some of the baggage the bootcamp has been holding onto (and help it attract more students).

“No matter which option you choose, you will be signing legally binding documents that will affect your finances,” BloomTech’s website states. “We’ll do everything we can to help you feel confident about your decision.” Moving to focus more explicitly on outcomes-based education places Bloom in the same bucket as other bootcamps eyeing accreditation as a future path (plus, the institutional-sounding name doesn’t hurt, either).

Accrediting as a service and the future of alternative degrees

Ultimately, Lambda School was one of the most well-known coding bootcamps out there, with a solid flurry of “Lambda for X” competitors such as Henry and Microverse. Other companies also offer ISAs, such as Pursuit, V School, Launch School and the Grace Hopper Program. Lambda’s name recognition helped it become somewhat synonymous with the startup-powered bootcamp market. With today’s news, it will need to rebuild customer awareness alongside its pitch to get more customer loyalty.

BloomTech has not yet responded to requests for further comment from TechCrunch.

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YC alum Make School gains rare accreditation for 2-year applied CS bachelor’s degree

Higher education is a mess. College students spend years learning arcana and quaint academic theories, only to be thrust into the harsh light of the workplace where they are ill-equipped to handle even the most mundane task. A crisis, a moral failure, or perhaps simply an expensive mistake, college is clearly in need of a reboot.

Colleges would perhaps love to innovate on their models, but are stymied by accreditation agencies charged with maintaining the standards and integrity of higher education. Unfortunately for students, those standards are based on inputs like classroom time, years on campus, and major / minor curriculums rather than on measurable outputs like job income. Worse, these agencies are advised by the colleges and universities themselves, who rarely see disruptive and innovative education as a positive.

That’s why the news today that Make School has received accreditation from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) is so interesting.

Make School is a project-based, product-focused program based in San Francisco founded by Ashu Desai and Jeremy Rossmann. The two founders centered the program’s curriculum around a bachelor’s in applied computer science, but rather than learning algorithms or data structures theoretically from a textbook, they reimagined the university from the bottom up by teaching skills through a progression of working software applications and products.

As I wrote in a profile of the company three years ago, “At the heart of the school’s approach is the belief that focusing on an actual project helps motivate students in ways that college never does.” Desai and Rossmann started by teaching game programming, but then saw that the enthusiasm of their students could be extended to other areas of software engineering and product design.

Beyond just redesigning a typical college program, they scrapped the notion of a four-year bachelor’s degree and replaced it with a full-time, two-year curriculum. That simultaneously eliminated the “summer melt” that plagues the traditional American academic calendar, and also significantly cut the cost of tuition for the program. Make School generally uses an income-share agreement in lieu of upfront tuition for its students, which means that students pay nothing during the program, but then pay a percentage of their income after they graduate.

Make School had a novel model for teaching a complicated subject, but it was unaccredited. For students, that meant that Make School’s courses most likely couldn’t be transferred to other accredited universities, nor could they receive public student loans, which mandate that a school be accredited for disbursement.

WASC, the accreditation agency in charge of higher education in California, Hawaii, and certain territories, has in recent years revised its “incubation policy” to encourage more non-traditional education providers to pursue accreditation. The model works by linking accredited universities with unaccredited institutions, with the eventual goal of making the startup accredited itself.

In Make School’s case, its accreditation collaborator is Dominican University, located just north of San Francisco. Make School students will be able to minor in computer science by taking classes at the university’s campus.

For Make School, it’s one more milestone on the way to rebuilding higher education.

Posted on

YC alum Make School gains rare accreditation for 2-year applied CS bachelor’s degree

Higher education is a mess. College students spend years learning arcana and quaint academic theories, only to be thrust into the harsh light of the workplace where they are ill-equipped to handle even the most mundane task. A crisis, a moral failure, or perhaps simply an expensive mistake, college is clearly in need of a reboot.

Colleges would perhaps love to innovate on their models, but are stymied by accreditation agencies charged with maintaining the standards and integrity of higher education. Unfortunately for students, those standards are based on inputs like classroom time, years on campus, and major / minor curriculums rather than on measurable outputs like job income. Worse, these agencies are advised by the colleges and universities themselves, who rarely see disruptive and innovative education as a positive.

That’s why the news today that Make School has received accreditation from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) is so interesting.

Make School is a project-based, product-focused program based in San Francisco founded by Ashu Desai and Jeremy Rossmann. The two founders centered the program’s curriculum around a bachelor’s in applied computer science, but rather than learning algorithms or data structures theoretically from a textbook, they reimagined the university from the bottom up by teaching skills through a progression of working software applications and products.

As I wrote in a profile of the company three years ago, “At the heart of the school’s approach is the belief that focusing on an actual project helps motivate students in ways that college never does.” Desai and Rossmann started by teaching game programming, but then saw that the enthusiasm of their students could be extended to other areas of software engineering and product design.

Beyond just redesigning a typical college program, they scrapped the notion of a four-year bachelor’s degree and replaced it with a full-time, two-year curriculum. That simultaneously eliminated the “summer melt” that plagues the traditional American academic calendar, and also significantly cut the cost of tuition for the program. Make School generally uses an income-share agreement in lieu of upfront tuition for its students, which means that students pay nothing during the program, but then pay a percentage of their income after they graduate.

Make School had a novel model for teaching a complicated subject, but it was unaccredited. For students, that meant that Make School’s courses most likely couldn’t be transferred to other accredited universities, nor could they receive public student loans, which mandate that a school be accredited for disbursement.

WASC, the accreditation agency in charge of higher education in California, Hawaii, and certain territories, has in recent years revised its “incubation policy” to encourage more non-traditional education providers to pursue accreditation. The model works by linking accredited universities with unaccredited institutions, with the eventual goal of making the startup accredited itself.

In Make School’s case, its accreditation collaborator is Dominican University, located just north of San Francisco. Make School students will be able to minor in computer science by taking classes at the university’s campus.

For Make School, it’s one more milestone on the way to rebuilding higher education.